


Radiant's Words

by Lscholar



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: (not as clever as I think I am), Gen, I am So Clever, Words of Radiance AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-08 05:39:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5485634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lscholar/pseuds/Lscholar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death before Life.</p><p>Rot infests Alethkar. Alethi Lighteyes throw decadent banquets in the midst of a warzone; men die like insects, crushed by the Highprinces' greed. The Windrunner remembers his father's words: when infection has claimed bone, amputation becomes a necessity.</p><p>Weakness before Strength.</p><p>Nohadon's words lie forgotten. The Highprinces test the bounds of the Vengeance pact, Gavilar's legacy; his son Elhokar is weak and his death unavenged. God is dead, and his ghost haunts the Bondsmith, urging him toward a throne he swore never to take. </p><p>Destination before Journey.</p><p>The sky darkens. Windows rattle in their panes; a thin cold wind heralds a storm unending. The Elsecaller stands alone against the End of Days, head unbowed and eyes unblinking, facing the stormwall with the abhorrent moral calculus it demands.</p><p>The Knights Radiant return too late, I fear. The Everstorm comes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ketek

**Words of Radiance,**

**ages silently longed for,**

**await,**

**for long silence ages**

**a Radiant’s Words.**

   

- _Jasnah Kholin, Tanatashev? 1173 Era of Solitude. Most of Jasnah's work is precisely dated; this was found in the margins of a notebook, without title or date. The most likely date, on which the page proper was written, has been retroactively applied._


	2. by spherelight

The door swung shut, and Shallan’s footsteps faded. Jasnah Kholin found her gaze drifting toward the unwavering white light of her sphere goblet.

 How long had it been since she’d had a good night’s sleep? Six years at least, since the night her father was murdered.

Those six years had been long, but not long enough. Dumadari, the Indicium, Azimir’s Archives; each and every single one a waste of time. She’d even gone back to Valath, steeling her nerves, unsure of herself—for nothing, as it turned out. She’d pieced scraps of ancient accounts together seeking the Oathgates, and she’d found them, all locked. In a world without Vorinism, that research alone could have made her a master scholar, with access to all the resources that status implied.

On that thought, her shadow swung back toward the spherelamp, dimming the clearmarks within the slightest fraction. The walls of the cabin seemed to close in.

What had she been thinking? She’d meant to dole knowledge out carefully, to nurture Shallan’s love of scholarship; instead she’d dropped the imminent destruction of civilization on her ward’s lap and expected her to hold up. Shallan was stronger than she had given her credit for, but that didn’t justify her actions. Each and every risk at this stage had to be weighed carefully. If Shallan had broken down? If she’d understood, really understood, what her oaths would drive her to do, what was coming? She wouldn’t have had the strength to withstand it.

What ambiguous pronoun usage. Wit would have found it hilarious, but the King’s Witless could go shove a rusty sword up or down any number of his orifices.

Jasnah sighed and breathed in, eyes closed, very pointedly not looking at her mirror. The golden scroll clip went on her desk, next to the lamp, and she crossed her arms, one hand on each shoulder.

There was a way out. There was always a way out. 4500 years ago, somebody had found the way out. To the men and women of the Shadowdays, the Desolations had been a fact of life, but they had been ended. Somebody, some brilliant soul, had done the impossible: broken the cycle and saved millions of lives.

 It didn’t matter.

She’d been caught by the Thief’s Downfall: an elementary fallacy. A man is caught stealing. He fears the law so much that he kills the man who caught him; now the law really is after him. Unable to repent, he digs himself deeper and deeper until his untimely death. Others knew it as the Atheist’s Downfall, but she rather preferred the version that didn’t involve her experiencing everlasting torment. No matter how far along a path one went, change remained a possibility if one admitted they had been wrong.

Jasnah Kholin hated being wrong.

Perhaps with non-Vorin master scholars, anthropological investigations of the Parshendi they’d dismissed as savages, uncensored archives, full cooperation from Ivory and the spren, and five more years, she might have obtained the evidence she sought, might have averted the Desolation entirely.

She doubted it.

The Desolation didn’t care how hard she’d tried, how many sleepless nights she’d spent poring over censored copies of translated fragments, how many brilliant insights she’d had or how much she’d given up. Results were all that mattered, and she didn’t have them. She’d told Shallan that they were headed to the Shattered Plains to find Urithiru and study the Parshendi. It had been a half-truth. With so little time left, she couldn’t assume the Oathgate would be open. Her mother had mentioned a bridgeman, and Jasnah had her own suspicions about Dalinar’s visions, but, most importantly, the Warcamps were the staging ground for an enormous concerted military effort that she'd need to co-opt.

She'd found Shallan, or Shallan had found her. There would be others, she hoped, but even if they never appeared, so long as Shallan survived, she wasn't alone. 

She had promised Shallan she would rest—and she _would_ , but there was work to be done. The tumult in her mind wound down and down until eventually she let herself drift away, still at her desk.

 

**\---**

 

_Blood blooms in the water._

_Jasnah can’t close her eyes or turn her head. Something dark is seeping in, through the hairline cracks at the edges of her vision._

_She knows she’s dreaming, but she can’t shake the feeling that the something flickering in the corners of her eyes is everywhere she can’t see, filling the void behind her, vast and incomprehensible, coiling around her legs, breathing on the small of her back and almost brushing the back of her neck; never touching, always circling. Her hair floats loosely, until subtle movement disturbs it._

_Her dreams have always been strangely painless, devoid of physical sensation._

_Jasnah would roll her eyes if they weren’t fixed in place. Tonight’s nightmare is the most recent of a long series of attempts at expression by her tremendously stressed subconscious mind. Jasnah’s tremendously stressed conscious mind finds nightmares blasé. The end of the world looms: she’s too tired to care about anything else._ _Her nightmare can do whatever it likes._

_With that thought, her muscles unlock. The dream’s texture clarifies. It doesn't mean anything, she knows; it's her mind sorting itself out._

_Still, she twists in the water. There’s nothing there._

_If there is something there, it knows, somehow, she thinks. Of course it knows. It’s a figment of her subconscious. Why would she be surprised?_

_Why should she be surprised? Could she be surprised?_

_Something with too many fingers grips the back of her head. Her eyes break inwards like glass_ _and black water pours in, sloshing over her organs and lapping at the inside of her skin. It pools in her toes and rises, up past her knees, sloshing at her heart and spilling over into her arms, until it pours back out of her mouth; darker, somehow; thicker, and cold like nothing she's ever felt. She finds herself gagging, trying to spit it out; it’s all she can do to keep the last little sliver of herself from filling up, and she keeps spitting and gagging and all around her the water grows darker and darker—_

_The ink is cold. She's never dreamed cold before. And on that thought—_

_\---_

Jasnah Kholin awoke shivering to screams and the smell of smoke.

_Shallan_ _—_

There was a blow to her head, and then she was gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here the strict canon compliance ends and the canonesque conjecture begins. 
> 
> this project's been sitting in my head for a while. I have maybe 6500 words done? in little bits and pieces; they need to be tied together. they're all in various stages of editing though.
> 
> expect the next bit up in a day or two? reviews/kudos are/will be appreciated; this is being written primarily as a writing exercise, so (keeping that in mind) don't pull punches.


	3. devoid

Ivory had told her that enough stormlight would allow her to survive anything short of decapitation. Jasnah had hidden gems full of stormlight in her dress. Once attacked, she would fake her death, sip stormlight, and elsecall away, with her assailants none the wiser. She hadn’t anticipated the stabbing, but, in theory, the plan remained sound.

She’d underestimated the pain involved.

An assessment: Jaw broken? after the fourth impact; knife pinning her to the floor like a cremling specimen; blood clotting sticky on her face and pumping out of her chest, still, in great wracking spurts; the edge of the knife slicing through her skin and organs; muscle spasms, uncontrollable. The sensory enhancement provided by Stormlight extends to pain.

It took everything she had to stay silent.

She drew more light in; her locking muscles, combined with the rocking motion of the ship, pulled the knife back and forth like a wire through avramelon. It drained away, and she had to stop herself from using the rest. The wound closed around the blade only to be sliced open again.

Painspren were everywhere; bright orange blobs of sinew, reaching.

She pulled her limbs underneath herself and pushed up, inch by agonizing inch-

Her flesh caught at the hilt and she nearly blacked out.

Her last-ditch option, then. She'd come back for her notes, for Shallan, but she had to get off the knife. Jasnah had little experience with Elsecalling, and it was frustratingly imprecise, but she was out of options. She flung her mind’s eye, glowing with stormlight, out, toward the distant shore, felt it catch, and _pulled-_

Something was wrong. The impression of the knife seared her consciousness like she’d touched its spren. Her shock saved her life; she dropped the connection a split second before she would have been torn in half.

Then the backlash hit, and, mercifully, she lost consciousness.

 

\---

_Something vast, ancient, and unquestionably malevolent stirs in the black depths; a hatred almost as old as the world, smooth like a river-stone, hard and edgeless._

 

\---

 

 

Her chin was sticky and warm with blood. Judging by temperature, she’d only been out for a few seconds.

Had it been a few seconds? Her thoughts were thick and slow..

The blood was cold and sticky, now. Her reserves of stormlight were dangerously low.

Ivory spoke. “Jasnah. We must go, Jasnah.”

“Shadesmar.”

She knew he understood. He replied, voice pained but firm. “I will not. The knife binds you, and grinders await. You would die _._ ”

Jasnah rolled her eyes. 

He maintained his position. “It is possible that here you might live. You could heal or be saved. Shallan could come _.”_

Then what? The girl couldn’t elsecall. She hoped, for Shallan’s sake, that the Ghostbloods would only kill her.

“You would suffer more.”

Ivory looked flustered, almost embarrassed. In all the time Jasnah had known him, she’d never once seen him like this. It was a pity she'd most likely never get to needle him over it.

“I… am sorry. It was not supposed to be this way.”

Jasnah lay there, unable to respond, dancing back and forth across the border of consciousness, waiting to die.

 

\---

_The whispering hatred has arrived. Its victim hovers on the hazy edge of consciousness; soul and body nearly split. Ordinarily, it would sever that bond. Today, it has a task to perform. It extends into a mind- an unorthodox use of its abilities, to be sure-_

 

\---

_blood blossoms in the water; blooms like a firework in slow motion_

_something seeps in at the edges of her vision, of her self_

_Maybe she is dead. Perhaps, contrary to common sense and logic, there is an afterlife and some quirk of fate has placed her there._

 

_She asks. Her query is wordless: Who? What?_

**_Stone crumbles away into dust into Void; rotting flesh peels apart into thin slices; the dying speak twisted truths and the dead scream; souls fizzle away and in the haze of their passing, the future unfurls, fractal cracks in shattering glass; cause and effect and effect and effect, in a dizzying endless spiral; suffering through knowledge; the tracks of fate lock; an eyeless gaze of bright clear hatred; eyes burned away, and in the smoke insinuations of impossible geometries; mountains rise from the deep and the tides grind them down again and again; red and black and ash and flame; cities and kingdoms rise and the ruinous tide of the Voidbringers seethes over the world again and again; the one who instructs; arms and legs moving unbidden, toward predestined death; in a name: Moelach._ **

She _**understands.**_

something whose utility function maximizes suffering; it might as well be the inverse of her own. the future unfurls before her like one of the bloody red carpets she saw on the night the war began, inexorable; stained.

_With her death, Ivory loses his handhold in the Physical realm. He will be condemned to an eternity as a broken blade, spent in agony, twisted by Hatred._

she sees she sees she closes her eyes and still the images come pouring in,

_One month and three days in, Renarin kills himself, filled with hatred for his own uselessness, just so the other survivors have one less mouth to feed. He sacrifices himself so that others might live. They will not._

that's not realistic. renarin doesn't hate himself that much. he wouldn't-

 _Renarin's death spells Adolin's doom._ _He slips one day  (three days later) and they rip him to shreds._

he can't he'd be in shardplate adolin's too skilled-

_Dalinar's sons die, and the Blackthorn loses his will to live. Two weeks after the mangled remains of Adolin's body are recovered, the Assassin comes for him; he doesn't even resist._

dalinar, stubborn drunkard, a fighter to the end-

_Navani throws herself in the shardblade's arc. It doesn't even slow down._

mother. so much i never got to say-

_The survivors cast lots for their corpses. Cannibalism is preferable to starvation._

_Without Dalinar, Elhokar falls in a matter of days (eight days, almost exactly). Less than a week later, Kholinar burns. Aesudan and her infant son burn with it. The assassin a woman once hired would have given her a far cleaner death_

...

_Relah returns to the city, seeking shelter. She finds only smoking ruins; the Voidbringers find her._

no-

_Shallan?_

_There's a sound like a heartbeat/a drawn-out note/the ruffling of pages and then: a flurry of images, a glimpse of a future._

_Shallan disappears on the Wind's Pleasure. Jasnah scours the ship to no avail._

_She hates herself. Jasnah has seen the notebooks she thinks she’s kept hidden; dead-eyed brothers, a drunken father, low gray skies and long dark corridors. The notebooks are terrifying._

_All those drawings convey something of the hollowness she must feel, but there are pages and pages of drawings of Jasnah, glancing, smiling, holding herself just so. An uncomfortable number of them are nudes, though there’s nothing that could be called untoward; nothing she's seen, at least. Shallan is a gifted artist, but these are on a different level than the rest of her work. They are the most beautiful art Jasnah has ever seen._

_That’s what she thinks of her. The Jasnah she keeps in her mind is impossibly gorgeous and brilliant and understanding and kind and loving; somebody who cares about her more than anything._

_The Lightweaver weaves herself a lie. How appropriate._

_And you're not going to change that, are you? You need as many Radiants as you can get for the Desolation. You would do anything short of murdering innocents to save the world._ _One girl’s feelings are nothing._

 _You feel bad, of course, but you're not going to let her down gently. She is going to steel herself and do what has to be done. If she dies for you then she dies of her own free will, fighting to save the world, right?_

_She dies for you in a roundabout sort of way, or for her memory of you, at least. She dies alone on a battlefield, hoping maybe you'd have been proud of her._

_The fact that you threw her away wouldn't cross her mind-_

_except **Moelach** is there too, always there_

_and it tells her, in her dying moments_

_and her pain is delicious, satisfying in a way beyond hunger or sex, like a dark warm glow in the heart of the Teacher; something it will cherish forever._

_Perhaps this instantiation of Jasnah Kholin should feel grateful that the choice was never hers._

**_Timelines flicker and ripple; cascade and weave; stack and Radiate._**

**_Ten of ten dead._ ** ****

**_Ten is repulsive. Ten_ binds. **

**_Ten fingers clench. harsh beams of sunlight pierce like spears; a fearful and incomprehensible symmetry clicks into place; nine stars fall to earth; nine candles flicker out; the eye with two pupils closes like a sunset; one star hangs in the sky to suffer through anguish; fractal fracture futures all converge- a resolution:_ **

**_The pattern is an ancient one. It has sufficed before._**

**_One survives to suffer._ **

**_An affirmation. Jasnah Kholin does not die here._ **

**_Jasnah Kholin will survive. This has been decreed._**

_there it is again, that deep satisfaction. the languid grin of a lipless mouth._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder what metal that knife is made of?
> 
> =)
> 
> EDIT: 2/27/16  
> Cleaned up Moelach's thingy


	4. ataxia

**Moelach**.

The name alone was too much, almost too heavy to hold in her mind. 

She couldn't put it down.

**_Lips open, black ink pours forth; a crystal lattice shatters juncture by juncture; world-state lines extend back and forth like roots and branches, sickening in complexity; violet eyes, her eyes, burned away into black smoke; razor wire threads unspool; a net, a web, a noose-_ **

What stories she had found were vague: men who’d gouged out their eyes in hopes of unseeing things they dared not speak of, women who’d wasted away alone, terrified of their own actions but more terrified of death, children who’d taken knives to themselves rather than suffer as their mothers had.

She’d thought the rumors unreliable and deeply unsettling, and contented herself by postulating their conflation with various chthonic cultural archetypes over time. If the Unmade truly existed with the powers legend ascribed them, they would have been capable of destroying any Radiant resistance.

Her axiom had been correct. A thin joyless smile played on her lips.

She’d been shown what she had to do, to escape.

She would draw her shardblade and slice the legs off her desk, leaving the sphere goblet to shatter on the floor. She would use the stormlight it brought her to pull the knife from her side, then drag herself to her trunkful of spheres.

It was inevitable. She’d sworn oaths: Life before Death, Strength before Weakness.

Every second she waited brought her closer to death; every second she waited was a moment of defiance, however small.

\---

 She knew she wouldn't find Shallan.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> awfully short I know
> 
> but I need to plan out the first interlude, and the next bit has been giving me trouble for quite some time. the important thing is to keep updating, right?


	5. slow burn

The air was thick with smoke, and Shallan was nowhere to be found.

She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be; Moelach operated to maximize suffering. Shallan's death pre-desolation would result in far less total pain to her, unless her death was somehow particularly brutal and painful or Jasnah's own emotional distress outweighed it; assuming Moelach was a rational agent and she had proper information.

Her refutations rung hollow.

It occurred to her that all the assassins had been men. She recalled the look of terror Shallan had worn that night in the alleyway, mere months or weeks ago. No, Moelach would have shown her. Unless- had it selectively presented events to cause her unexpected pain?

Her breath caught in her throat. 

Nothing had changed, she told herself. Her mission remained the same: get to Stormseat, seek the Oathgate, rally what Radiants she could find.

Nothing had changed, she told herself. She almost believed it. 

\---

Jasnah clasped a cloth wet with seawater over her lower face and peered through the smoke.

Where was Shallan? The sailors were dead, but she hadn't seen Shallan's body. Moelach had told her exactly where the assassins were; her shardblade had made quick work of them.

“We must be leaving.” Ivory repeated. “Now the Wind's Pleasure dies.”

He, at least, was back to his usual self; focused, if distant.

Jasnah didn’t respond.

The two of them entered Shallan’s room. She too had fallen asleep late, scarce hours ago. Her desk was covered in pictures: attempts to describe the fractal forms of her Cryptic, Santhydyn anatomy studies, a sketch of Jasnah in the alleyway.

“Jasnah, you swore oaths.”

She wasn’t listening. She had to find Shallan. Had she checked under the bed?

Shallan wasn’t there. Of course not. The girl had more sense than that, airheaded as she occasionally was. Her ward had been experimenting with illumination; she could be hidden anywhere, unconscious due to smoke asphyxia, or worse.

“Life before Death.”

Jasnah pointedly said nothing. She was following the oaths she’d sworn.

Ivory spoke again. “I devote myself to truth.” The second oath of the Elsecallers. She would never forget the day she’d sworn it, and she doubted he would either. Memories boiled up, memories she’d meant to deal with but never had time for. She certainly didn’t have time now. She forced them down, well aware of exactly what he was doing.

“I will do what I know must be done,” Jasnah said. Her third oath. She’d sworn it alone, in Kholinar’s library.

She riffled through the papers. Where would Shallan hide her most prized possession? Certainly not atop her desk.

Ah.

“You must escape. We must save others.”

A beat. Then: “The bond requires it.”

She knew he was right.

She found it difficult to care.

Jasnah leveled the papers on the desk, took Shallan’s private notebook from under her mattress, and left the room.

 

\---

 

The Wind’s Pleasure collapsed as it sank. Jasnah was forced to use her shardblade to cut her way up. Once they arrived on deck with the only trunk she had had time to save, she focused on the distant shore, barely visible through the smoke, and-

 

\---

 

a whip of stormlight reached out and snagged her-

 

and _pulled_ -

 

\---

 

Jasnah landed in waist-deep surf, wisps of stormlight misting off her skin. Behind her, the Wind's Pleasure breathed its last and sank beneath the waves; ahead, Mishim’s green light cast strange shadows on the barren shore of the frostlands.

Ivory maintained his silence. She knew, logically, that he had been right, that searching any longer for Shallan would have risked her research and Roshar's survival past bounds her saner self would have deemed acceptable, but she couldn't muster the emotional energy to make herself care. She wasn't angry at him, exactly. Stormlight seething in her system made it hard to function. In the morning, under the sun, things would be different.

The two of them went wordlessly up the beach under Mishim’s pale face, Jasnah lugging her single trunk and Ivory pacing, hands in pockets. Small waves rolled on the shore behind them.

When they were far enough past the waterline, Jasnah released the trunk, arranged what little flammable material she could find, and waited for Ivory to take her into Shadesmar.

He’d only done what he’d thought was right. She could respect that.

She didn’t have to like it.

Shadesmar revealed itself around her. Glass beads moved at her command; she sifted her fingers through them until she found what she was looking for.

 _I am a stick._ Ivory's voice, here in Shadesmar, was smoother.

“You are fire.”

_I am a stick._

“You are wood. Wood burns. You burn. ”

 _I am-_ “Fire. You are fire. You will burn.”

Jasnah cut Ivory off; he grimaced slightly but continued to translate.

_I am a stick._

Jasnah dropped the sphere back into the teeming sea. Before Ivory could say anything, she picked up the spren of a smooth black stone and fed it stormlight.

“Change. Now.”

Physical reality reasserted itself.

The fire crackled merrily between them, and in the distance Jasnah could hear the ocean lapping at the shore.

Jasnah felt around. She identified the stick easily; she’d touched its soul.

She threw it into the fire.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> interlude time!
> 
> next, I mean. this is not an interlude. This project was conceived of as a swap (hence the title) where Jasnah escapes the Wind's Pleasure without Shallan. the Stick scene was one of the first bits I wrote, months ago.
> 
> anyway, interlude one, seer, should be up later today or tomorrow. thanks for reading!


	6. interlude: seer

Click.

Turn.

Swipe.

Snap.

Renarin sat on his bed, suffering.

His left hand remained on the hilt of the shardblade Adolin had given him, safely blunted with a bladeguard. It would stay there for three more days. His right fiddled with his box.

Click.

Turn.

Swipe.

Snap.

It would have been much easier with two hands, he knew. Every turn, the box threatened to fall.

He wanted to take his hand off the shardblade. Just being near the thing made him vaguely uneasy; last night he’d slipped in and out of sleep, mind clouded with static and a voice in pain.

He hoped he’d been dreaming.

Voice or not, he held on. He’d been cursed with blood weakness from birth; cursed by the Almighty with the sight of the Void, and cursed with an inability to handle the holy weapons He’d given men. This, at least, he could control. Perhaps the shardblade would be better put to use in another’s hands, but Adolin would win more soon enough, and, bolstered with plate and blade, Renarin might actually be useful.

That would be nice.

Click.

Turn.

Swipe.

Snap.

All one-handed.

He had time to bond the blade. Adolin’s swordmaster, Zahel, the man he would undoubtedly end up training under, wouldn’t return for two weeks. He could let go, get a good night’s rest, and take it up in the morning.

He wouldn’t. The sooner he bonded the blade, the sooner it would be gone. Renarin wasn’t the type to put problems off, or he didn’t want to be.

If only he had both hands, he could relax. From what little Renarin knew of fabrials, they didn’t care about body parts. The light heat augmenters aunt Navani had insisted on showing off had been attached to legs, hands, and arms.

Shardblades were different, but he couldn’t see a reason the hand would be special.

He set the box aside and, using his right hand, carefully dragged the shardblade over his wrist, making sure it stayed in contact with his skin. Nothing happened, so he pulled it the rest of the way up and tucked it under his arm, leaving his left hand free.

The feeling of wrongness remained, so he supposed the bonding was working. 

Click.

Turn.

Swipe.

Snap.

Much better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Renarin seems intelligent, and I wanted to get that across. 
> 
> next chapter within a week, hopefully. I've got dialog to plan~
> 
> edit: 1/13/16  
> computer broken. some files recovered. not dead i promise.
> 
> edit: 1/14/16  
> a new computer has been procured. progress resumes.   
> if there are any non-kaladin characters you want to see interludes of (kaladin already has at least one coming up) say so. knowing people are reading this really makes me want to write more. i have a thing that needs attending this weekend, but the remainder of today and tomorrow are set aside for writing and packing- so expect the next bit soon (if I can figure out how to dialogue and reread certain sections of WoR for background).


	7. journey

The sun rose and set and rose again.

Jasnah elsecalled her way across the barren frostlands lash by lash, alone with the sky, tears tracing her chin. Years of layered crem deposits had created occasional flared-hand formations, reaching west, away from the storms; sheltered pockets of color bloomed in the natural laits and pools their cupped palms provided.

The pattern was familiar. She’d seen it before, somewhere.

The Dawncities.

Had they too been Voidbringer’s work? The Parshendi sang, she knew, and the symmetry some called divine was characteristic of a pure intense cymatic note. Kholinar’s windblades might very well have been created as livestock pens.

She kept going.

 

\---

 

There was an art, she found, to rationing stormlight. She took just enough to keep her muscles humming and her blood hot, to stay awake and elsecall: not enough for her aches and pains and bloodied feet. She could heal them at the plains, or with light from the next storm, she reasoned, and she needed every edge she could get.

It wasn’t enough, and she knew it.

It was something, at least.

\---

 

She’d hoped running on such low levels would lessen the crash when it came; she’d been wrong. With stormlight she could make herself move. Without it, her legs refused her.

Jasnah managed to herself to the nearest stone hollow, where she collapsed on her trunk.

That was how the caravan found her: curled up and passed out, awaiting the Highstorm.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: 2/21/16  
> I have the flashback arc and chapters planned out- and bits and pieces of them written.
> 
> It may interest some of you to know that the first one begins with somebody being outed.
> 
> really though I am still working on this. that is not dead which may for a month lie; in blah blah aeons even hiatus may die


	8. Flashback: Trial

Eselet Meren cut an imposing figure. Wavy gray hair spilled out of her black robe; she wore the hood low, leaving only her thin-lipped mouth uncovered. Some called her the greatest scholar since Gavarah. Jasnah detested hyperbole, but she had to admit that Meren was a skilled researcher.

Meren had come across the country for her interview; she hoped the woman saw something in her. Kholinar’s scholars had been shocked—princess or not, such a journey was unheard of. Eselet Meren had other reasons for her trip, Jasnah was sure. She was flattered regardless.

“The Veristitalian Order would like to formally congratulate you on reaching your age of majority. I understand, Jasnah, that today is your twenty-first birthday? You are a girl no longer?”

Jasnah nodded. “Yes ma’am.”

“You’re unusually young.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think you’re ready?”

“Yes, ma’-“

“Of course you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”

What could she say to that?

A slight smile played on Meren’s lips. Jasnah was not reassured.

 

“We’ll begin, then, with the Sunmaker; a relevant figure to our current political climate. Name his ten sons.”

“Ruthar. Vamah, Aladar, Roion. Sadeas, Kholin, Bethab, Sebarial, Hatham, and Thanadal, though this last was adopted.”

“Three corroborating primary sources regarding Thanadal’s adoption.”

“Yustara’s _Conquests_ , Aladar, through his wife Nashai’s account of the subjugation of Kelathar, and Thalis’ treatise on his commander’s tactics.”

“Biases inherent in each viewpoint?”

“Yustara, as an Oldblood, naturally portrays Thanadal as lacking legitimate claim; Thanadal was partially responsible for the conquest of Shamel, her home. Aladar’s relationship with Thanadal was complicated, and Thalis was an Ardent.”

“And membership in the Hierocratic Ardentia is sufficient to disqualify testimony?”

“Falsehood springs from falsehood, and Thalis was culpable in the deception of millions.”

The veil over Meren’s eyes made her expression impossible to read.

“Very well.”

 

\---

 

Meren's questions were relentless; Jasnah had studied relentlessly. 

 

\---

 

“Tell me the Almighty’s Tenth Name.”

The Veristitalians pursued truth, Jasnah knew; she’d chosen the order hoping to find likeminded scholars. Borderline heresy was, for her, a good sign—though not something she was used to voicing.

“Eli-Elithanathile.”

Meren’s face was unreadable.

“You couldn’t have just written it down?”

“I was asked to tell you the name.”

“Elielithanathile?”

“Elithanathile, then.”

 

She’d put a little more venom into that than she’d meant to, but the woman was toying with her. If this was a test, of knowledge or of character, she would pass it.

She was _good_ at tests.

Meren turned, robes flowing around her.

“The Tenth Name is verboten. Knowing this, why did you voice it?”

 

It _was_ a test, then. Justifying her actions by pinning the blame on her interviewer would get her nowhere.

What to say then? The truth? Jasnah discarded the idea as soon as it appeared. She could lie—but she’d have to admit error where none existed. She could take the loophole: as a human, she was unable to pronounce the name of He Who Transforms—but somehow she doubted Meren would be impressed.

If she told the truth—

She _was_ being tested by an Order that sought truth.

Jasnah stared into Eselet’s veiled eyes. She forced herself to speak slowly and clearly; she nearly succeeded.

 

“The Almighty is fully capable of defending himself. Were he to smite me down, I would submit to divine judgement. I will wait for him to do so, should His ineffable will choose to manifest itself in such a way; until then, I stand a heretic.”

“Girl.”

 

Jasnah’s heart stopped. She'd failed

Meren continued, voice flat.

“The will of the Almighty is not always made manifest through the storm. Would you believe, Jasnah Kholin, that He occasionally passes divine judgement down through humans? An order like this, famed for truthseeking, draws a certain kind of heretic like a storehouse draws vermin.”

Jasnah could feel her fingernails digging into her palm. Lack of reaction could, in itself, be a tell.

“I once held the view you hold now. You’ll outgrow it eventually. What do you think happens to those who don’t?”

Jasnah said nothing. Meren frowned like she’d been expecting a response. Jasnah wouldn’t give her one. Why bother? 

 

“They live worthless lives and die worthless deaths.”

Another silence filled the room. Meren broke it first, just as Jasnah would have finally spoken.

“Of course, most of them aren’t descendants of the Sunmaker. I know history, Jasnah Kholin. Dalinar and Gavilar Kholin will succeed—though I can’t say if their Alethkar will last. The Alethi Crown Princess will be a Veristitalian. Perhaps her journals may shed light on the matter, in a hundred years—though she displays a certain bias against the Almighty.”

Jasnah found her voice.

“What makes you so confident I’ll take your offer?”

“Do you want the world to see you fail at your first attempt to do anything on your own? What about your father? Your merit is completely irrelevant, of course—but nobody knows that, and nobody needs to.”

Jasnah wanted to scream, to deny her earlier actions. She found herself without words.

Meren took her silence as the agreement it was.

“There is one additional stipulation. You’ll have to take a ward; I know just the one. If you want an adult’s position, you’re going to have to take adult responsibility. I’ve brought her with me.”

"Fine."

Meren turned to leave. She was at the doorway when Jasnah spoke up.

"Would I have passed?"

"It's irrelevant." 

"Please. You owe me this, at least."

"Nobody owes you anything, child," Meren said. Her voice was not unkind.

Jasnah hated her for it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (finally)
> 
> (sorry bout that wait.)


End file.
